Silent Hill: Burning Fog
by AreDash9000
Summary: Natalie Grisham has been suffering from waking nightmares for weeks, ever since the map had appeared to her in her apartment's parking lot. Now sinister messages are appearing to her everywhere she goes, always bearing the same summons: 'Return to Silent Hill'. When Natalie finally decides to go, she finds herself facing a horror that blinds and burns.
1. Prolouge

_Clang clang clang clang_

Her heart beat faster. She was standing still on the metal walkway, the darkness around her pressing in, save for the tiny diameter of light from her flashlight falling on the blocked hallway in front of her. The pocket radio started to rumble with faint static.

She whirled around, flashlight beam swinging wildly, cutting through the darkness. The incessant clanging against the metal flooring had ceased, yet the static on the radio had turned from a low rumble to an erratic whining.

_Clang clang_

_Drip. Drip. Drip._

Into the beam of light stepped the salivating creature that she had first encountered upon entering this wretched town.


	2. Chapter 1

**Chapter One: Warm**

Natalie drug the back of her hand against her brow, ridding it of the sweat that had accumulated there. The day was hot, and her hike through the woods was more taxing than usual as she had done the cliché and gone down the 'path less traveled by'.

She beat back the bushes as she pushed her way through to the centre of the woods, towards the pond with the raft floating in it.

Natalie reached out to push aside some longer branches of a bush. Feeling a sharp pain in her hand, she withdrew quickly, leaning against a tree. She examined the palm of her hand.

Little trickles of blood streaked down from the nicks where the thorn bush had scraped her. Some thorns still remained lodged in her skin. She set to work picking them out.

As she worked her fingernails around a half-exposed thorn, something moved in her peripherals. She looked up.

A doe was standing a ways away, approximately twenty feet. The animal had her head lowered, tail flicking, stepping carefully through the brush. She paused, and quickly raised her head, large ears swiveling about. One toothpick leg still lifted, the doe turned her head about until she was looking directly at Natalie.

The two stared at each other for some time, the deer's ears cocked, before the animal blinked and cast her head towards the ground to investigate a patch of clovers.

Natalie watched the deer continue to graze, forgetting for a moment about the thorns in her hand. The animal flicked her tail and moved with dainty steps, swiveling her ears as the forest spoke. Natalie's fingernails still rested on the palm of her hand, the top of a thorn clutched between them as if they were tweezers.

Then crashing sounds came from the left. The doe's head shot up, ears pointed frontwards as she stared over her shoulder, eyes wide. A shout of high-pitched laughter rang from the direction of the path, and the deer sprang away, the white underside of her tail exposed, signaling alarm.

The laugh had jarred Natalie, causing the thorn to go deeper into her hand.

"Damn," she muttered, wrenching it out. She looked up to see two little girls in bathing suits and sandals chase each other towards the pond. Behind them, wearing a sundress and sunglasses and carrying a beach bag was a woman who could only be their mother. She paid no mind to Natalie as she walked past, keeping watch on her rambunctious daughters.

When she had gone down the path more, Natalie went around the thorn bush and took the more direct route to the pond.

She cursed herself yet again as she found herself caught in a thicket of brambles moments later. Her path was completely blocked by thick, snarling bushes, the limbs decorated with thorns varying in sizes, all razor sharp. She turned to go back and frowned.

The brush had sprung up out of nowhere, making a complete circle around her of brush nearly impossible to get through. Natalie stepped back, alarmed.

The bright day suddenly darkened. The girl looked up. Thunderheads had moved in, blocking the sun, darkening the forest.

It was too dark.

It should have been merely grey, but this was as if night had fallen.

She looked back at the bushes and her heart skipped a beat.

The branches were completely devoid of leaves, and the thorns were all a uniform size: large and ragged. But what got her was the fact that the branches were woven around one another and were twisting in their circle as if motivated by energy. They had a slight red tint to them.

She took another step back and noted how differently the ground felt underneath her. She looked down at the forest floor. What once had been sod covered in dry grass and leaves was now an industrial metal flooring.

She knelt to see if she could crawl under the bushes, but no: the base of the plants had burst through the flooring, and were as thick as the twisting branches.

Natalie stood back up. She could hear something. Something on four feet. It sounded...

_Clangclangclangclang_

She whirled around, straining her eyes to see whatever it was that was coming towards her.

It was the deer.

It had been skinned. Every shining muscle stood out brilliantly, rippling, as it leaped over the revolving, writhing bush. Its maw was wide open, revealing three inch long canines. Natalie screamed, threw her arms up to protect herself, and stumbled backwards into the bush.

"Are you okay, Miss?"

Natalie's eyes snapped open. It was dazzlingly bright once again. The world had returned to normal. Birds were singing, the ground was covered in brush, and the 'deer' was nowhere in sight. She was lying flat on her back in the middle of the path that was usually taken by those who wished to go to the pond. Standing over her were two little girls and their mother, all looking upon her with concern.

"I..." Natalie slowly sat up. She rubbed her head. "Y-yes, thanks, I...must've overheated..."

"Would you like some water?" asked the woman with concern, reaching into the beach bag. "I always bring some for my girls..."

Natalie accepted the bottle of water and drank from it. She stood shakily.

"Thanks," she said, rubbing her eyes. "I...I think I'll just go home."

"I think that's best," replied the woman, staring. Natalie turned and started to walk off down the path, in the direction of the apartment units.

_These hallucinations have to stop, _she thought wearily. _I've been having them so often...it's getting harder to separate dreams from reality..._

The apartment complex, Sunny Days, sat in front of the woods boldly. It was a brick building with three floors, many windows, and no elevator. It wasn't a far walk from town, and though there was no pool, tenants frequented the pond in the woods when it got warm enough to swim.

Natalie ascended stairs to the second floor and unlocked her apartment's door, where she was greeted by a cool blast of air. She tossed her keys at the key dish, slammed the door behind her, and sank onto her couch, burying her face in her hands.

After a moment, she looked up, wiped her eyes, and went into her bedroom. She rifled through the drawers to find the map she'd found in the parking lot.

She scanned it's surface, an action she had repeated so many times she now had the entire town memorised. Still, her eyes roved over Toluca Lake once more.

She didn't know it's significance. But she did know that the map had appeared right after she'd begun to have the night terrors and waking nightmares.

She turned the map over and stared at the words hastily scrawled on the back of it.

_Silent Hill._


	3. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two: Dark**

Natalie opened her eyes, staring at the candle's single flame on her bedside table. It was a moment before she realised something had awoken her. She sat up and looked around her room, darkened aside from the faint glow of the candle, the wick deep in a valley of wax walls.

She drew her blankets up to her chest and reached for her phone underneath her pillow. She turned on the screen to see the time: two in the morning.

Sighing, she cast another look around her room. Her sleep had been unusually dreamless, something that happened once in a blue moon lately, and she wished that she could have finished this restful sleep cycle.

Or was she really awake...?

Her eyes were locked on her closet. Her heart skipped a beat as she realised why it looked off: the door was ajar. What made it worse was that the closet door opened inwards.

The flame sputtered in the candle. Natalie paid no mind to it. She knew she had to shut the closet door. Opened doors in the dark made her...uneasy. Yet...how had it gotten that way in the first place?

Natalie slowly turned and, eyes never leaving the open door, got up from her bed. She started towards the closet, then hesitated. She tore her eyes away from the door and searched for something to protect herself with. She spotted a heavy vase containing a bouquet of dried flowers. She armed herself with this, removing the dead roses.

She continued her painstakingly slow and silent path towards her closet.

She held her breath. Three feet away now.

Raising the vase over her head, she extended a hand, reaching for the doorknob, immersed in the dark maw of the closet.

She was very close now. She was almost touching the knob.

The candle flame sputtered, and her only source of light extinguished.

Natalie cried out in horror and reflexively withdrew her hand, and not a moment too soon. As soon as it had left the arch of the doorway, the door itself had slammed shut so hard it knocked a picture from the wall.

Something moved behind her.

Natalie sprinted back towards her bed, grabbed her lighter, and franticly flicked at the spur. She could hear something moving closer to her, grumbling in low tones.

_Click_

_Click_

The light flared, illuminating a skinless, sinewy creature with no eyes and a gaping, lipless mouth filled with oversized human teeth inches from her hand.

Natalie screamed, recoiling backwards. She kicked out at the creature, and it shrieked, not from pain, but hunger, as it lunged for the girl.

She fell off of her bed, taking some of the sheet with her. It tangled around her feet and tripped her, sending the lighter cascading out of her hand as she was brought to her knees. The flame from the lighter disappeared.

"No!" she shouted, kicking her feet from the sheet. As she pulled herself forward, she instantly knew something was wrong.

Her room suddenly smelled strongly of decay. The floor felt of industrial metal, as it had in the forest and in countless other nightmares.

The thing shrieked again and leaped off of the bed, landing with a bang several feet to her left.

This brought Natalie back to her senses. She scrambled to her feet and ran in the direction of the door that led to the living room.

She didn't bother to slow down, but slammed into it. Out of sheer habit, her hand flew to the light switch and flicked it on.

She blinked.

Her room was exactly the way it looked before she had gotten out of bed to close her closet door. Still carpeted and smelling not of rot but of vanilla, the scent of her candle. The only things out of place were the sheets trailing from the bed to the floor and the lighter resting near her dresser.

Natalie exhaled deeply, gripping fistfuls of her shoulder-length brown hair. But she didn't dare close her eyes.

"Why," she moaned quietly. "Why the hell is this _happening to me!" _

She couldn't help but scream the last few words.

When she felt ready, she trudged back to her bed. She examined her candle. It was spent; the wick was no longer usable.

She had not turned off her lights when she had decided to lay back down. It felt safer this way. She had not had a waking nightmare in her apartment before. They usually consisted of herself running through a fog-filled town, only to come face-to-face with a variety of monsters. Recently, the 'deer' had joined the queue, but the teeth-thing was by far the most common to give chase.

Her overhead lamp gave a strained buzzing. Natalie looked up at it, hands clasped tightly.

"Oh, please no," she whispered, eyes filling with tears of desperation.

They flickered, but only casting the room in darkness for half a second before coming back on without complaint.

The girl stared at the mirror directly across from her. The message scrawled across it in red was something familiar to her, but one she had not received right in front of her eyes before.

She read it slowly, mouthing the words as though she had never seen these four words grouped together before.

_Go to Silent Hill._

Natalie reached out for her bedside table and lifted the candle. From under it she took out the map of the aforementioned town. She examined it once more.

She looked up at the mirror, at the red message. Natalie gritted her teeth.

She would do it. In the morning, she would pack a bag and go to Silent Hill.


	4. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three: Rain**

Jeans.

Shirts.

Undergarments.

Toothbrush.

Hairbrush.

Natalie hesitated. What else? Her wallet, obviously. She tossed that inside the black pink-polka-dotted duffel bag as well.

_Nobody knows you're going to this place, Nat._

She paused, hands poised over a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. This had only just occurred to her, and it was true: she had made this rash decision, as she made most other decisions, without thinking of the consequences first.

_The difference this time is that it's not too late to pick up your phone, call mom, and let her know where you'll be._

And tell her what? Tell her that she's going to a town nobody has ever heard of because a message on her mirror told her to? After she hallucinated in the middle of the night, no less? Natalie's mother would think she was…

No, she told herself, throwing the matches and cigarettes into the bag vehemently, I'm not crazy. I am _not_ crazy.

The bag was packed and ready to go. It rested to the right of the door, waiting patiently for Natalie to pick it up, deposit it in the front passenger seat, and begin the journey.

Natalie, however, was not quite ready to do her part for the bag. She sat in front of her low-budget computer, Google-searching Silent Hill. The first website she clicked on hailed a tourist-y site, advertising Lakeside Amusement Park and The Lakeview Hotel as their main attractions. The town, Natalie decided, was rustic and quite charming. She wouldn't mind spending a day or two at the town.

She clicked on a link to bring up a map. It matched her own to the T. Natalie clicked away from this, to see photos of the town. A neighborhood was nestled in the northern part of the town, as were a few shops and restaurants. This part seemed to be mostly residential, though the amusement park and the big hotel were located not far from the suburban housing. Across the lake was the hospital and two apartment buildings. The town wasn't huge, but she _was_ glad that she had a car; having to walk around that town would be quite the workout.

And so, Natalie Map-Quested directions to the old town, and at last, picked up her bag, and went to her car.

It pattered down on her car's windshield, running down it in frantic streaks, only to be whisked to the left by rubber blades. The rain had started at noon, and eight hours later, it was still going in the steady, not quite hard but still consistent, rhythm it had taken on.

Natalie turned onto Riverside Drive, continued for a bit, and then pulled into the motel's parking lot. She pulled the key out of the ignition and stepped out into the rain to go rent a room.

A thin man with a receding hairline stared at a grainy baseball game on an old television set. He looked up, shocked, when Natalie opened the door to the lobby.

"I'd like a room," Natalie stated as she approached the front desk. The man blinked at her slowly.

"We don't often get visitors here no more," he replied. "Not no more, not no more."

"Uh, well…" The girl found the situation horribly awkward. "Do you, I mean…do you have any vacant rooms?

"Sure do," the man replied, unhelpfully.

He stared at her, eyes slightly squinted. Natalie shifted uncomfortably.

"Can I please rent one?"

"What?" A thin line of spittle crept out of the corner of the man's mouth. Then, quite suddenly, his eyes cleared and he straightened up, all creepiness abandoned within seconds.

"A room?" he repeated, voice unslurred and educated in dialect. "We have many available. A single bed, I assume?"

"You'd assume correctly," Natalie replied, unnerved. "What are your rates?"

"Sixty a night." He opened a large log book and picked up the pen resting next to it. "When will you be checking out?"

"What's today's date?"

"The seventh."

"The tenth, then," she decided. He scribbled this down in his log. She gave him the first night's payment, as well as her name and phone number, and he gave her a key to room 9.

Lying on the motel bed that night, Natalie found she couldn't sleep. She stared at the ceiling, the black-screened television, the mirror in the bathroom (_just _visible through the doorway), the large windows next to the front door. The alarm clock, drilled into the nightstand next to her, read out 4:12 a.m. in glaring green.

Not a sound was made in the motel room. She was alone with her thoughts.

Slowly, they drifted to her sister. Her dead, little sister.

The memories played back before her eyes.

_It was bright outside. And warm. Almost hot, but not quite, because it was only April, it was springtime, and that is a time for warm. Natalie and her sister Casey were very young. Natalie's birthday had been yesterday, giving her another year to put under her belt. Casey was seven. Her older sister had just turned nine._

_The two were playing in a field down the street from their house, heeding their mother's warning to be careful of snakes. They ran and ran and ran, and then they stopped near a tree to catch their breath._

_"Race ya to the big tree!" challenged Natalie. Casey looked up and grinned and charged off. Natalie hung back, good-natured, to give her little sister a head start. She counted off five seconds and took off after her. She was gaining on her, then Casey had gasped and disappeared from sight._

_Nine-year-old Natalie new instantly that something was not right. She yelled and sped up, stopping just to the left of where Casey had disappeared. Natalie could see straight away where she had gone. Opening just before her was a three-foot-wide hole, very deep and dark. Natalie got on her hands and knees and leaned into the hole._

_"Casey!" she called._

_No answer._

_"Casey! Casey!"_

_Still, there was silence. Natalie got to her feet and dashed off towards home._

_She burst into the kitchen, startling her mother._

_"My goodness, Nattie, you almost gave me a heart attack! What happened to your knee? Where's Casey?"_

'My knee?' _thought Natalie absently. "Mama, Casey fell down a hole, she isn't answering me!"_

_"She fell down a hole? Where?"_

_"In the field we were in!"_

_"Did she trip, or—"_

_"No! Mommy, she fell _inside,_ it's a deep hole, there are bricks in it! There's a word for it, I just can't remember—"_

_Natalie's mother had set down the aluminum bowl and whisk she had been holding and dropped to her knees, gripping Natalie's pudgy arms._

_"Well, honey, the word is—is well. Did she fall down a well?"_

_The alarm in her mother's voice frightened the child even more than the event itself._

_"Mommy—"_

_"FOR CHRIST SAKE, NATALIE, DID CASEY FALL DOWN A WELL!"_

_"Yes!" Natalie sobbed, frightened beyond anything she had felt before._

_And before she knew it, Natalie's mother had let her go, and was on the phone with police. Natalie stood in the middle of the kitchen, sobbing loudly, as her mother hung up the phone. _

_"Natalie Grisham, you show mommy where the well is right now!"_

_And so the two ran down the gravel road towards the field. Natalie had no trouble at all finding the well again, and as her mother shrieked hoarsely down into the opening, she recalled dully that she had fallen somewhere along the way on her mad-dash back towards the house. A stinging sensation hit her knee as a thin stream of blood crept down her hairless shin._

_"Casey! Casey, answer me right now!"_

_And police sirens were showing up, and then a helicopter, and then somehow her sister's limp form was pulled from the well, and her mother was screaming, and—_

"NO!" shrieked Natalie, sitting bolt upright, a feverish sheen of sweat on her brow. She threw oppressing blankets off of her and stood. The room was cast in a peculiar grey light. Natalie stared at the windows, bemused.

Opaque white fog pressed up against the glass, swirling with the direction of the air currents.

Natalie pushed her sister from her mind. The clock read seven a.m. Whether she was ready or not, it was time for her to face the day.

She opened her duffel bag and sorted through it to find the map of the town. After a minute she located Silent Hill Historical Society, and circled it with a red felt-tipped pen she had brought along. Stowing the motel key in her pocket, she opened the door and stepped out into the fog.


End file.
